Merge data into a hash

Perl hash (often called dict/dictionary in other languages) is very useful structure to store key-value associations in one compact structure.

For example

my $person = {
    name    => 'Joe',
    surname => 'Smith',
    address => '123 Elm street',
    city    => 'Boston',
};

A hash reference (basically a scalar with an address) is used here, so the initialization is with {}. I needed code to update such hash with data from another one, which was created by an user action, something like this

my $updated = {
    name    => 'Jim',
    city    => 'Denver',
    zip     => '80014',
};

The code I came with is based on the fact that keys and values functions return items in same order as is internally stored in the hash, so simple slice assignment would do

@{ $person }{ keys %$updated } = values %$updated;

When dumped with

use Data::Dump;
dd $person;

we got updated name and city and added zip entry

{
  address => "123 Elm street",
  city => "Denver",
  name => "Jim",
  surname => "Smith",
  zip => 80014,
}